8 Things You Should Probably Start Doing Immediately

A recent reading/discovery phase has lead me to the following life workflow gems.

Get a Personal Assistant Through Fancy Hands

Fancy Hands is a digital personal assistant service where you subscribe to a number of requests per time period. Here are some examples of what you can do with them:

Call Allen Car in NYC and have them pick me up at home and take me to the airport tomorrow at 7am. We’ll need a car seat for an infant provided.

Find me a dog walker in SE Portland. I’m looking to have my two dachshunds walked 3 times a week. What are the prices like?

Set up a meeting with my accountant (CCed), if she’s paying let’s go to Balthazar, otherwise our office.

Call and get a reservation at Momofuku Noodle Bar next Thursday around 8pm. There will be 3 of us.

Call and update my reservation at Momofuku Noodle Bar. There will be 8 of us now!

Can you find a list of 10 twitter users who work at LinkedIn and have more than 200 followers?

Can you arrange for us to hear music from the following five bands?

I need a copy center within 4 blocks of my hotel in St Louis that is open tonight (Sooner the better!)

I’m a guy and I live alone… my house is kinda filthy. What are my (cheap) options for a housecleaner… say once a week.

I’m moving from Miami to San Diego. Can you obtain quotes for 5 movers? (I’ve attached a breakdown of the rooms, furniture, etc.)

I’m stunned it took this long for this type of service to appear, but I signed up as soon as I read about it.

Have Amazon Send You Certain Items On a Regular Basis using Amazon Subscribe and Save

Using Amazon’s Subscribe and Save you’ll never run out of deodorant, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, etc.–and it’ll be cheaper, too. This is Steve Corona’s list, which is where I got these first two tips.

Assemble Your Burning House List

Take note of what matters to you. The site The Burning House highlights the lists of others to give you inspiration.

Learn About Other Creators’ Workflows

UsesThis is a site where you’ll find a ton of new ideas on toolchains, ways to be more creative, etc. It’s been enlightening.

Subscribe to the Svbtle Blog Network

No. Seriously. The first few items here came from Svbtle, and it may easily be the highest signal to noise ratio in this type of blog I’ve ever seen.

Use Mechanical Turk to Automate Human-required Tasks

Mechanical Turk Examples: proofreading, editing, busting CAPTCHAS (kidding). This is another tip from Steve Corona, and it’s a great one.

Set Up a Cloud-based Backup Solution

Having a backup drive, or even a NAS, at home is no longer enough–especially if you do any kind of business there. Pick a solution and start protecting your most important documents and images. Some options include Mozy, Crashplan, Bitcasa, and Dropbox.

Build a Survival Kit

No, not a zomby kit. A real one. There are many guides out there, like this one from Popular Mechanics, or this one from FEMA. Then there’s this one from Uncrate. Either way, don’t have nothing.

A few of these are newish, but we should all be doing most of them. I’ll be updating it as I get comments and/or find others in my online travels.